Group of Wealthy Individuals Demands Tax Hikes

Wealth for the Common Good, a self-described "network of business leaders advocating for shared prosperity and fair taxation", issued a report today designed to convince Americans that we actually aren't being taxed quite enough!

"Over the last half-century, America’s wealthiest taxpayers have seen their tax outlays, as a share of income, drop enormously, by as much as two-thirds for the highest-income grouping the IRS tracks. Meanwhile, the share of their household income that middle class Americans pay in federal taxes has increased slightly."

The fact that people get to keep more of their hard-earned money is a problem in exactly which way?

Of course, one has to balance their spin on events with a story from the AP that talks about how the tax burden today actually falls:

"Tax Day is a dreaded deadline for millions, but for nearly half of U.S. households it's simply somebody else's problem.”

About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That's according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization."

It's apparent that higher-income people are the only ones paying any income taxes, and so the point being made by this organization lacks clarity and purpose, and raises the specter of another agenda being at work.

Maybe Wealth for the Common Good can disclose the net worth of their individual members, so the public can better judge whether their appeal to raise tax rates on high-income people is truly as self-sacrificial as they want others to believe. For example, if the better part of their membership is already wealthy, then any increase in tax rates will not affect them nearly as much as other high-income people who don't quite have their amount of wealth.

The members of Wealth for the Common Good need to be reminded that there is no reason they can't already pay as much in extra taxes as they wish to the US Treasury. If they feels that would be especially patriotic or will somehow be invested wisely by the US Government, they should do so. But in the meantime, leave the rest of us out of their quixotic cause.